Don't mean to derail the topic any further, but are there any Saturn emulators? Everyone gives NiGHTs all kinds of praise so I'd really love to try it, but getting my hands on a real Saturn and a copy of the game would likely be... difficult.

On a side note, I'd forgotten how butt-ugly the Dreamcast controller was!

miniSphere 5.1.3 - Cell compiler - SSj debugger - thread | on GitHubFor the sake of our continued health I very much hope that Fat Cerberus does not become skilled enough at whatever arcane art it would require to cause computers to spawn enourmous man eating pigs ~Rhuan

Jester: Ooh, that's a nice way of putting it -- angle vs magnitude. I never thought of it like that. That's precisely what it is; the octagon's so good for games requiring precise magnitude because it's so much easier to slide along a flat surface than a rounded one, so you can very precisely dial it in.

Don't mean to derail the topic any further, but are there any Saturn emulators? Everyone gives NiGHTs all kinds of praise so I'd really love to try it, but getting my hands on a real Saturn and a copy of the game would likely be... difficult.

On a side note, I'd forgotten how butt-ugly the Dreamcast controller was!

It's also super-uncomfortable. The D-Pad is atrocious, the triggers are awkwardly angled. But that VMU, oh that glorious VMU! Makes up for it a dozen times over.

Oh, noticed a funny thing about controllers recently.SNES: The upper face button is blue.Dreamcast: The right face button is blue.Dualshock: The lower face button is blue.X360: The left face button is blue.

I actually find the DC controller pretty comfortable. Most games don't use the D-pad much at all, and I don't mind the triggers any more than a 360 controller's.

I've tried to run Saturn games on emulators. It approaches impossible to play NiGHTs on emulator, partially because the Saturn is a really, really complex architecture (approaching as much raw power as a PS2, but broken up into over 8 processors).

NiGHTs does NOT run well on any of them. Possibly because it was a really taxing game for a Saturn in the first place, and written somewhat later in the console's life by the same company that designed the hardware. It runs on SSF and Satourne, although with severe graphical problems in both (and requires some coaxing even then). It requires lucky results from undefined behaviour to run on Yabause, but runs OK there--but with no sound, and takes several minutes to start. None of the emulators can play it off of disc (probably because the Saturn had an overcomplicated disc format), and making a rip of a Saturn game is really difficult.And it's like that for a lot of Saturn games. I've tried for years, and there's no getting around it. Only about 50% of all Saturn games are playable in emulators, and almost none work perfectly.

However, there is still hope. You can buy NiGHTs for Windows on Steam. Or for PS3 on the PSN (but not in the US), or on Xbox 360 in the Xbox arcade.

The downside is that this version has removed content: no versus mode, the control is 24-way control (which is still not too bad) instead of analog angularity no matter the controller you use, and several easter eggs and hidden/end-game features are gone (like the final A-life stages, the secret Sonic level, and the secret demo-version of the first two levels). It does, however, come with some promo content, Christmas NiGHTs, but if you already have a Saturn you can buy that for extremely cheap online.

Don't mean to derail the topic any further, but are there any Saturn emulators? Everyone gives NiGHTs all kinds of praise so I'd really love to try it, but getting my hands on a real Saturn and a copy of the game would likely be... difficult.

Zophar.net has all the emulators. All of them.

I'm thinking you might be more familiar with Homestuck than you initially let on. Now what would make me think that, I wonder...

@Flying Jester: So NiGHTs is available on Steam? Good to know, I have a Steam account, so maybe I'll check that out. What you said about the Saturn architecture is interesting, though... so it had 8 processors? I never realized how ahead of its time the Saturn was, explains why it had so much hype surrounding it when it came out. Released in '94, and it took 12 years (2006) for anyone else to come out with anything approaching that kind of power (speaking of course about the PS3 with its 8-core chip). But I guess Sega was always known for that. The Genesis was in competition with the NES from what I remember but was equivalent to a SNES, the Saturn is apparently equal to a PS2, and the Dreamcast--graphically, anyway--is essentially a PS3 sans HD. And of course, that's what killed them in the long run--the consoles were so far ahead of their time that nobody knew how to develop for them. Goes to show that you can have the greatest piece of hardware in the world but it doesn't do a bit of good without the software to back it up.

miniSphere 5.1.3 - Cell compiler - SSj debugger - thread | on GitHubFor the sake of our continued health I very much hope that Fat Cerberus does not become skilled enough at whatever arcane art it would require to cause computers to spawn enourmous man eating pigs ~Rhuan

Well, it wasn't 8-core. It had a two CPUs (SH2) and a two GPUs, a 65C02 that handled DMA, a 68k that handled audio, an SH1 that handled CD access, and a Yamaha FH1 DSP (which ran in tandem with the 68k).. I mean, it's common for there to be multiple processors for different systems, but what makes the Saturn so complicated was that the CPUs weren't identical (same for the GPUs, even more so), and that every processor could be reassigned to different tasks than what they were intended for--they all had access to main memory, and they all had access to DMA commands.

This is actually a similar configuration to a Genesis with a Sega CD and 32x, plus the two GPUs.

The reason that Saturn games rarely looked as good as other contemporary consoles is because you really can't write a game that could keep 8 processors (of which no two work identically) all working all the time, particularly when there are so many rules about how they can interact. It is just not feasible to get much more power out of the system than you could from the other consoles--and even that took a ton of work. Sega had infighting over the NiGHTs engine, since it was so much work to get even that much 3D running on the Saturn!

It also didn't help that the GPUs thought in terms of quads, unlike every other GPU ever, which think in terms of triangles. I would imagine that did not make porting games any easier.

Last I checked, Zophar.net is no longer being updated and only contains an archive of all the old files before activity stopped, so...

Also, I never found a good one, myself. Maybe yabause has become better since I tried it, though (which is at least a year ago, and there seems to be a new version that was released only yesterday, so it's worth a shot).

Oh, well, that explains something. NiGHTs was one of the few test games I used to test out Saturn emulators before I got frustrated and just went Saturn hunting, haha. So it still doesn't work correctly, but other games too? That's a relief. (Bug! works well I believe.)

The name Rahkiin came to be when I needed a second name for Minecraft, as my first name was my full real name (was years ago, when MC was just out of alpha). I had been playing a lot of Skyrim and I love the Dragon Tongue they created. The Dragonborn is Dovahkiin in DL. That is: Dov_ah_kiin. Dov means dragon, ah means blood, kiin means born. The 'dovah' is the dragonkind. (As in the human kind). So it means Dragon-born, or actually 'born with dragon blood'.

Now I wanted an awesome name like that! So I looked for a nice dragon language word, and I found Rah. Rah means 'god'. So Rahkiin actually means Godborn / child of god. Now that is just very arrogant and not doing well with the believing ones. But heh, who knows the Dragon Tongue from mind? Nobody! So Rahkiin it is.

I have used Jarvix for a very long time, but that got a bit boring, and it is now also the name of my (actual) company.

Oh it is a bit serious. Well, not so serious as the Elfish by Tolkien, but it makes some kind of sense sometimes. There is some kind of singular/multiple idea, etc.

Mostly the texts are combinations of nouns and more nouns that, by adding some verbs have a meaning. But the Word Walls all have dragon inscriptions and they form a text. And there is all Thu'um with meaning and pronunciation.

And of course there is the Dragonborn song: A song in Dragon language that rhymes, works on the melody of The Elder Scrolls, and when translated into english, rhymes, makes sense and fits in the melody of The Elder Scrolls. I think it is genius.

I think the Dovah language was based off of Latin, and English words with Latin roots or suffixes will tend to rhyme together. Therefore the Dovah language rhymes well enough. I think it was a neat language idea, but hardly a real language per se, such as Elfish or Klingon.

If you use code to help you code you can use less code to code. Also, I have approximate knowledge of many things.